It's Saturday night. My name's Warren Ellis, and most of the Old Testament was about me.

Saturday Night Open Mic; a space where you stop listening to me and I start listening to you. It's for getting things off your chest, talking crap back at me, telling me what you're doing, telling me what you're planning, and enumerating the many blasphemous and feral ways in which you love me.

Tell me something filthy, strange and wonderful. Tell me secrets. Tell me the future. Tell me what and who is pissing you off this week. Tell me you understand what The Triangles meant when they wrote the line "Sing a song, sing a song/About how things seem more important at night."

Show me photos, for I am senile and I don't know all your faces yet.

I want to know. I want to know everything. I am your ear and your confessor and your audience.

I am stressing out about school. I keep telling myself that I only have a couple weeks left and that I've worked too hard to fuck up now, but finding motivation is getting more and more difficult. Still, I'll survive. I always do.

I'm pissed because there were so many things I wanted to do this weekend. NYCC, Coronation, Relay for Life, Polar Plunge.... And I can't do any of them because I'm stuck in fucking South Dakota. The only good thing about being here right now is that there are about, oh, 20 good looking college guys playing volleyball without shirts on outside my window. The testosterone-induced posturing is a bit annoying, but the eye-candy more than makes up for it.

ETA: I've decided that I'm going to go for a nice, long, meandering wander. It's 65 degrees outside and I'm alive. I figure it's high time I celebrated.

A little peek at the special kind of joy that is being my girlfriend. The other night I happened to peek over her shoulder as she composed an e-mail and saw the line, "rest assured, Adam's never drugged a girl to have sex with her." Awsome.

Found a bar in Chicago that pours a nice, slow pint of Guinness. This evening I'm opening the Glenlivet 18 year. It's supposed to storm here and having whiskey on the back porch while the rain comes in is a fine way to kill an evening.

My people come from Ireland so I've been thinking about death while drinking. Thinking about what's been lost. Say the oldest person is 120, that means living human recollection before 1888 or so is lost, and really it's more like the 1890's or so, since not many people can recall being infants.

Reading in college about how little we know of the common people from history was shocking. A couple of literate farmers here and there, but millions and millions passed on without any record, save perhaps a tax note, or a christening.

Now, at the dawn of this century, any 15 year old leaves more evidence of their life than any 10,000 people born only a century or tow back. There's a site "Mydeathpace" where these ordinary lives are saved in such detail. Used to be only Pharoahs and Kings got monuments after they died.

I kind of like the idea of disappearing when I go. "LEAVE NO TRACE" is something they drill into you in camping and hiking. I like that as a philosophy. Maybe some of my writing, exhibits I've designed, movies I've made, porn I produced, but those will survive on merit, or not at all. I don't need a monument to me.

I've always said, when I die, since I read it in V for Vendetta as a kid, I want a viking funeral. Just burn me up, leave what I did on the land and let me ash into the sea. Make room for someone smarter, better, quicker.

Though small, the flatworm is a mighty creature. It lives in drainage ditches and stagnant ponds. It can feast upon bacteria, liver, frog eggs, mouse cells, or even human cells with its vacuum-powered esophagus. If you cut one into twenty pieces, it will become twenty new flatworms. I had 4, born from 2, and their taste for human cells was undeniable, but they have been laid low by the one feast they could not stomach:Hormel ham.RIP Adam, Eve, Cain, and Abel

Sewing more plush toys because I refuse to make some sweatshop in China employ 12 year olds to do it for me. Worried I shall fall afoul of the Toy Act somehow and would really prefer it if I could actually find the fucking thing on the UK Gov website. People send me nice pictures of them on holiday in Devon though, so it's not all bad.

Going to Wales this week, going to get suitably drunk in a Wetherspoons because what else do you do in Wales except drink and/or get stabbed?

Somewhat annoyed at the phrasing of the NYCC panel "Webcomics : Threat Or Menace", but looking forward to the write-ups to see if "all comics on the web are against a backdrop of internet piracy" is as ... pointed as I read it to be. Especially considering the content of this here website.

(...I swear this is not my usual expression. Just imagine I have seen a particularly rare and curious insect just before it was eaten by a chaffinch)

What I really can't get is why i am stuck in my house, in my room, sitting on a swivel chair (wheee!) and typing on a laptop computer in a vain attempt to appease THE ELLIS.

I am 17, I'm Irish (rare thing around here) and I should be out somewhere in the cold night... doing something. Drinking perhaps?

But since i Don't drink (gasp if you wish but some Irish men resist the genetic predisposistion to ingest alcoholic beverages until after they start primary school) and apparantly have a phobia of disco places with their disco things, here I am.

Best years of my life.

Are they being wasted? Anyone? Conclusuions, please.

Another problem besides the aforementioned one is this strange tickly urge to be creative. Specifically at the moment, it wants to take the form of writing.But I cannot, or will not, muster up the will to fulfil such an urge. Laziness obviously of a kind known only to those of the younger years must be to blame. But the thoughts are still rolling inside my head and the realities that could be made fiction by my writing hand wait on.

Oh, one thing. This Saturday Night open Mic thread, is it a 'one post per member' thing? If not, good stuff. If so, I will be breaking that rule until THE ELLIS says otherwise.

Curently re-evaluating my life, direction and goals type stuff...I get the same feeling as I do when examing my bank accounts-"Didn't I do more than this? Why isn't there more left?"It seems my early reckless, drunk rock star years are full of tales and adventures but left me with nothing,while now that I have focus and art i am proud of, no one seems to give a shit.

I'm not whining - I know I am not the only one who has thrown himself into something for too long with too little to show for it. I have lived more than most ever will (most people being sheep working jobs they hate for reasons they don't even know), but now what? Whats next?